Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day019.05
Last-Modified: 2000/07/24
MR IRVING: I have to let you get away with that, because I am
not allowed now to ask any further questions about the
photograph or about ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I did say I was not stopping you, but I was
telling you that at the moment I do not find it very
helpful. Do not say you are not allowed to; you are
allowed to.
MR IRVING: Is Professor Jackeln a recognized authority on
Hitler and the Holocaust? Has he written books and
articles about it?
A. Yes, he has written books and articles about Hitler in
particular, Hitler's views.
Q. Does it diminish him in your esteem that he has fallen
repeatedly for forgeries produced by a notorious forger,
that he has he published them, that he did not willingly
confess that they were forgeries or where they came from,
and that he has relied on a dubious photograph?
A. Well, you mentioned one instance in which he fell for
material from a notorious forger. If you can show me
there are many others, then I will accept the word
"repeatedly".
Q. Do you agree that, in dealing with your treatment of
the
Hitler diaries, you accused me of liking the Hitler
diaries and believing they were genuine because they
gave
a favourable impression of Hitler?
A. Again, I am following Mr Harris there. Let me quote
him
. P-39
in explaining why you endorsed them at a late stage,
"Finally there was the fact that the diaries did not
contain any evidence to suggest that Hitler was aware
of
the Holocaust". Really I am following Mr Harris's
argument there.
Q. On what basis do you say ----
A. That was one of a number of reasons which he puts
forward
for your having endorsed them at a late stage.
Q. On what basis do you say that these fake diaries
showed
Hitler ordered a stop to the Reichskristallnacht?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Mr Irving, I did say quite a long time
ago
that I am not going to pay any attention to the Hitler
diaries because it is not any part of the Defendants'
case. Really these questions are directly focused on
the
Hitler diaries, so I do now say you must move on.
MR IRVING: In paragraph 2.4.9, lines 5 and 6, there is a
sentence there beginning, "If an obvious forgery like
the
Hitler diaries gives credence to my views, I will use
it". Is that not a reflection -- am I allowed to say
that, my Lord?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: I have already told you in the clearest
possible way that I am not going to place any reliance
in
forming my judgment on what did or did not happen in
the
case of the Hitler diaries, so questions about it can
only
do you harm.
MR IRVING: Three lines from the bottom of that page 40 you
. P-40
accuse me of rendering my footnotes deliberately
opaque.
A. Yes.
Q. Can you think of any reason why a researcher or writer
who
has spent a lot of his private funds, who is not a
tenured
professor, who is entirely reliant on his professional
income, obtaining access to sources, might wish to
leave
his footnotes opaque?
A. Yes. Either in the case of your extremely vague
references to the author Ingrid Weckert in your
account of
the Reichskristallnacht, because that source is
discreditable, because she is an anti-semitic
politically
motivated falsifier of history upon whom you rely in
part
of your account ----
MR IRVING: Do you consider that anti-semitic ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let him finish his answer and then ask
you
next question.
A. Or that the sources do in fact, if anybody goes to the
immense trouble of tracking them down as in the
instance
we already mentioned on Thursday, the evidence of the
policeman Hoffmann at the 1924 trial of Hitler, if
that
source in fact contains things which you do not want
to
appear and you do not want people to know about. So
it is
a kind of judgment call on your part that you need to
give
a source, but you do not want people to find out too
easily what is there.
MR IRVING: Can you think of no innocent explanation why
the
. P-41
aforementioned author might leave his sources opaque?
A. No.
Q. Are you familiar with the kind of scholar and academic
who
will pretend that he has done the research, who will
pretend that he too has been to Canberra and Ottowa
and
Washington and Moscow, he will quite the file and he
will
quote the document number and even the page number in
that
file to give the impression that he has been there and
done the work?
A. Give me an example.
Q. I am just asking you if are familiar with that kind of
scholar?
A. I cannot think of any examples. Try and give me one.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is that legitimate, I really do not know
as a
matter of a historian's proper approach? If you have
seen
some other historian give a reference for a
particular proposition as being File X in the
Washington
archive or wherever, is it then illegitimate for the
next
historian simply to cite that as being the authority
without actually going to the Washington archive and
looking for himself?
A. Well, it is normal, my Lord, to say file so and so in
the
archive as cited in such and such a book. If you
simply
say file so and so in the archive, that does suggest
you
have been there. It is what I would call slightly
sharp
practice.
. P-42
MR IRVING: If, for example, you found in a book by David
Irving on Winston Churchill unusual sources and you
were
an academic and a scholar, if you did not want to be
associated with him, would there be a temptation just
to
use that file in the French National Archives or
whatever
it is and pretend you had seen it yourself, but not of
course that you had it from David Irving's book?
Would
there be that temptation?
A. I would not be tempted. I can only answer for myself.
Q. You would not be tempted to use the source?
A. I would want to go, if that was the work I was doing,
to
the archive and check the source. I would not take it
on
trust as it appears in your work.
Q. Even if you could go to some archives like the
Institute
of History where I did in the meantime deposit all the
records so that you could check it out? Do you
appreciate
that there might be an innocent reason on the basis of
what I have said, on the basis of my questions, why an
author might sometimes wish to make it slightly less
easy
for a crooked scholar to steal his brain work?
A. You would have to show that there were crooked
scholars
around who are all desperate to steal your brain work.
I do not believe that that is the case, so I do not
really
accept that there are innocent reasons. It is quite
straightforward. If you cite an original or any
source,
if you use a source in your work, you footnote it in
order
. P-43
to enable other historians to go and find it and you
are
as helpful as possible to them. It is part of the
kind of
checks and controls which historians have, and this
curious way we have to enable other people to
challenge
our own work and to falsify it and say that we are
wrong.
It is part of what I would call being an objective
historian is.
Q. Do you agree that there are two kinds of books? There
are
the super academic works as submitted for PhDs or for
some
other kind of academic qualifications where everything
has
to be rigorously footnoted according to a standard
scheme,
and books which are sold in Books Etc. and Waterstones
where books have to fit in within a reasonable size,
number of pages, and that, if you put all the
footnotes in
to that scheme, you are going to end up with an
uncommercial book. Do you agree with that
proposition?
A. Not really, no. I think there is a large kind of
scale of
books, or a spectrum of books, from the academic PhD
theses which is not really publishable as a book in
many
cases and has to be rewritten, where everything has to
be
all the Is dotted and all the Ts crossed all the way
down
to very general non-fiction books which do not have
any
footnotes in at all and everything in between. So I
think
there is a very wide spectrum. In respect of your
works,
Mr Irving, Hitler's War is over 800 pages long. It is
a
very long book, and the claim that you make for it is
that
. P-44
it is based on an enormous mass of research and there
are
a lot of footnotes in it. It does give the
appearance, as
your other books do, of being a scholarly work. You
make
a great deal of the fact that you use a large number
of
source.
Q. Professor Evans, when your researchers were
researching in
my files at the Institute of History in Munich, did
they
come across a thick file there which was about 1,000
pages
long, consisting of the original annotated footnotes
of
Hitler's War which were referenced by number to every
single sentence in that book?
A. No.
Q. It was not part of the published corpus, it was part
of
the original manuscript, but it was chopped out
because of
the length.
A. No, we did not see that.
Q. Have you seen isolated pages of that in my discovery
in so
far as it related to episodes which were of interest,
like
the Reichskristallnacht?
A. I do not, to be honest, recall, but that does not mean
to
say that we have not seen them.
Q. You said that my footnotes are opaque because they do
not
always give the page reference. Do you agree that, on
a
page which we are going to come across in the course
of
this morning, of your own expert report, you put a
footnote in just saying "see van Pelt's report", see
. P-45
expert report by Robert van Pelt, and that expert
report
is about 769 pages long, is it not?
A. Yes.
Q. That is not an opaque footnote?
A. No, because, when one says see this or see that, that
means that you are not relying on that for what you
say.
It is simply a further reference directing the reader,
if
the reader wants to gain further information about
that
particular topic, to go there. If I were relying on
Professor van Pelt's report for anything I say in my
own,
which I am not, then I would footnote it as precisely
as
I could.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Why are you not?
A. Why am I not relying on Professor van Pelt?
Q. Is there a reason?
A. Well, his report is about something different from
mine
and I thought I should reach my own conclusions on the
basis of my own work, but I do cross-reference other
expert reports in so far as I think it is useful.
MR IRVING: It is a strange kind of cross-reference that
just
says "See expert report" by somebody.
A. Well, can you point me to the page?
Q. We will come to it later on. I am just looking for it
and
I do not want to hold up the court. If you would you
go
now to page 41 of the expert report, please, paragraph
251? Can I ask that you be given bundle H1(i),
please, so
. P-46
we can see what you have omitted from the quotations?
It
is a passage where you say: "They are not lies, what
I
have published, they are true. At any rate, the truth
as
I perceive it". Then you omit bits.
A. Where is this -- yes.
Q. That should be H1(i) at page 94?
A. Page 94. Yes.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Whereabouts on the page, bottom of the
page,
is it?
A. It is near the bottom of the page.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
MR IRVING: Do you not admit a passage there about how it
gets
far more expensive the closer you approximate towards
the
truth, that it is quite easy to find out 90 per cent
of
the truth, and then it gets a bit more expensive to
get 95
per cent of the truth, and to get absolute truth is
impossible, but it gets more and more and more
expensive?
That is roughly the sense of it. I do not have it in
front of me, but I am familiar with the speech.
A. That is where you say it is a shame that we lost the
United States.
Q. Yes. "They are not out lies, what I have published, they
are true, at any rate, the truth as I perceive it"?
A. Yes.

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